She Chose To Go
- drdeb59
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
Grab a cup of tea. I have a story to share (repair) with you.
There’s a version of the Persephone myth that most of us were never told.
In the familiar telling, she is taken. Dragged. A victim of Hades’ hunger for her light. It's a story of loss, of innocence stolen, of a woman with no say in her own journey.
But there's another telling — older, truer, more her.
In this version, Persephone chooses the descent.
She hears the call of the underworld — that vast, unlit country inside herself — and she answers it.
Not because she is naive. Not because she doesn’t know it will be hard. But because she knows, somewhere deep in her bones, that there are parts of herself that have never been met. Never been seen. Never been welcomed home.
She goes into the dark not to be broken. She goes to be made whole.
This is the story we’re leaning into together in House of Shakti this month. And when I read the following words by Jeff Foster, I felt them say what I couldn’t find a way to say myself. I offer them to you now, as a companion on your own descent — and your own becoming.
It’s about coming alive. It’s about waking up to the grace inherent in every moment.
It’s about unconditional friendliness and infinite kindness to yourself. It’s about making it safe, finally safe for all of those unloved, un-met, unseen waves of the ocean of yourself to crawl out of the depths, out of the darkness, out of the corners and holes and crevices of experience and come into the light, blinking and full of wonder.
It’s about giving birth to yourself, so that all thoughts are finally allowed to flood in, all sensations, all feelings, all sounds, all those waves that we used to label ‘dark’, or ‘evil’, or ‘negative’, or ‘dangerous’, or ‘sinful’ – fear, anger, boredom, doubt, confusion, frustration, helplessness…
… are finally allowed to come to rest, to breathe, to be fully themselves in the space that you are.
They are not separate entities or enemies, they are intimate appearances of you, and so they cannot hurt you, even if they hurt, and this is what we forget sometimes in our rush to ‘fix’ or at least ‘normalise’ ourselves.
Yes, all of those swirling, pulsating energies of that which we call ‘life’ are welcome in the unlimited room that you are, the vast Living Room in which all of creation sings and dances and paints itself into the ever-changing picture of this extraordinary moment…
— Jeff Foster
You are the Living Room.
And everything that has ever lived inside you — every shadow, every ache, every inconvenient, magnificent wave — belongs there.
Welcome it home, sister.
With you in the descent and the rising,
Deb
Move With Me This Week
This week in PranaShakti Dance, we move to the theme of The Whole of You — an invitation to bring every part of yourself onto the dance floor. The tender parts. The fierce parts. The parts you’ve kept tucked in the shadows.
All of them welcome. All of them home.
Wednesday, May 6th • 9 am CDT • Balance Dance Studio, Austin
Friday, May 8th • 9 am CDT • Online — replay included
